More official bad news from SE. There will be no possibility for developers to adress the built-in camera on the P800. What that means: there will be no way to write software that turns the P800 into a videocamera or webcam, surveillance camera or whatever. SE say that there is a risk that hackers use the camera to spy on people, so they don't provide the API (tools) to work with the camera. Ridiculous. The camera in Nokia 7650 is freely available to developers. If hackers decide what honest developers can do, we live in a reversed world.

From the SE Developers Forum, this was posted by SE Develepor Support people:

"For this product it was decided to not disclose a native camera API towards third party developers.
One concern can be that the existing internal API's are not suitable for exposure (no pun intended) towards third parties and would require an abstraction layer for acceptable robustness. A public API needs to be concise, well documented and robust.
There are also considerable security/integrity issues associated with disclosing a public camera API. Image capture is a powerful capability in a Internet connected device and could easily be abused by malicious applications without end user awareness.
Someone assessing risks could say that the immediate availability of network connectivity in combination with image capture is a sitting duck waiting for those rogue apps to strike. Of course for a developer it is a very exciting feature to play with.
In case of the P800 the camera feature is available to end users through the integrated native 'Communicam' application."

J2theIZZO

05-12-2002, 10:54 AM

:evil: GRRR......I'm not a happy puppy :evil:

MaleBuffy

05-12-2002, 10:57 AM

"For this product it was decided to not disclose a native camera API towards third party developers.

There is always the possibility for SE to release such software!

natron

05-12-2002, 11:04 AM

:cry: It's a misstake, but I think, that it still will be the best phone (in the near future) ... Hmmm.. SE, you should make people happy !

PeteASJP

05-12-2002, 11:21 AM

Well, it doesn't take long for somebody to create an app for 7650 that will take pictures on the phone as long as it can, filling up the memory so that you have to reset it all. Not a clever program, not a virus, but still a pain in the phone owner's arse. And one thing the program could do before taking pictures would to send it's sis file to anyone on the phone's contact list with email addresses. This would then be a virus.

A more quiet bad program could take pictures randomly and quietly send them in binary format using GPRS to a server somewhere. So there you are, wondering why pictures of you or somebody else are all over the net.

So in this respect, this protection is good. Of course this decision at the same time limits the possibilities developers (also virus and malicious developers) have.

Maybe they are developing a way for the phone to ask the user for a permission to take a picture from an app, and then allow this?! Who knows.

Or maybe just the camera API was not yet ready to be published. Who knows.

drfonz

06-12-2002, 01:32 PM

Maybe they are developing a way for the phone to ask the user for a permission to take a picture from an app, and then allow this?! Who knows.

Or maybe just the camera API was not yet ready to be published. Who knows.

I think this is exactly what happened. If SE is to provide an API to control the Camera, the first thing that needs to be done is to provide the user with a setting that allows to enable/disable it at the OS level, so that any attempts to use it from any application will be discouraged.

At the same time this feature would need the extra-abstraction layer that was mentioned before and therefore time to be implemented. Who knows, the ability to control the camera from 3rd party software might appear in a firmware update... :x here's hoping!

AL

Afonso

06-12-2002, 01:33 PM

No video ever on the P800? never say "never" !
Lack of public APIs won't stop a determined hacker...
Hardware based encryption of video signal might but I am prety sure the P800 does not have this wink
Future *military* versions of P800 might have this, they would be planted around in every corner of Iraq. So if you go spend a week end to bagdad and see P800 hanging from trees all over the place you know what is happening P P

GhostDog

06-12-2002, 08:43 PM

SE are really asking for it,what are they trying to do,destroy this great device even before its official release?